How can I stop a route from a route

The CamelContext provides API for managing routes at runtime. It has a stopRoute(id) and startRoute(id) methods.

Stopping a route during routing an existing message is a bit tricky. The reason for that is Camel will Graceful Shutdown the route you are stopping. And if you do that while a message is being routed the Graceful Shutdown will try to wait until that message has been processed.

The best practice for stopping a route from a route, is to either

signal to another thread to stop the route

spin off a new thread to stop the route

Using another thread to stop the route is also what is normally used when stopping Camel itself, or for example when an application in a server is stopped etc. Its too tricky and hard to stop a route using the same thread that currently is processing a message from the route. This is not advised to do, and can cause unforeseen side effects.

Using a latch to stop Camel from a route

In this example we use a CountdownLatch to signal when Camel should stop, triggered from a route.

And in the route we call the latch as shown:

Using a thread to stop a route from a route

In this example we use a separate Thread to stop the route, triggered from the route itself.

And in the route we create the thread and call the stopRoute method as shown:

Alternative solutions

Camel provides another feature for managing routes at runtime which is RoutePolicy.

And CamelContext also provides API for suspend/resume of routes, and shutdown as well.

suspend/resume is faster than stop/start. For example a HTTP server will still run but deny any incoming requests.
Where as if it was stopped the HTTP listener would have been stopped.

shutdown means the route is being removed from CamelContext and cannot be started again. Its also removed from JMX.
A route must have been stopped prior to be shutdown.